Development of an integrated product information management system

This thesis reports on a research project undertaken over a four year period investigating and developing a software framework and application for integrating and managing building product information for construction engineering. The research involved extensive literature research, observation of the industry practices and interviews with construction industry practitioners and systems implementers to determine how best to represent and present product information to support the construction process. Applicable product models for information representation were reviewed and evaluated to determine present suitability. The IFC product model was found to be the most applicable. Investigations of technologies supporting the product model led to the development of a software tool, the IFC Assembly Viewer, which aided further investigations into the suitability of the product model (in its current state) for the exchange and sharing of product information. A software framework, or reusable software design and application, called PROduct Information Management System (PROMIS), was developed based on a non-standard product model but with flexibility to work with the IFC product model when sufficiently mature. The software comprises three subsystems namely: ProductWeb, ModelManager.NET and Product/Project Service (or P2Service). The key features of this system were shared project databases, parametric product specification, integration of product information sources, and application interaction and integration through interface components. PROMIS was applied to and tested with a modular construction business for the management of product information and for integration of product and project information through the design and construction (production) process

Configuring electrochemical 3D printer for PCB production

In this document I look at an electrochemical 3D printer and compare it to a more established machine for the making of printing printed circuit board

Assessing the impact of computer use on landscape architecture professional practice: efficiency, effectiveness, and design creativity

Landscape architects claim that computers are efficient and effective presentation tools. However, to date, no one has evaluated the impact of computer use on the nature and quality of design in a practice setting. To further explore this issue, a trial was conducted with landscape architecture students in which they worked in conventional, mixed and digital media. Results indicated that although computer use was efficient in some tasks, the nature of the design process did not yield itself effectively yet to complete computerization. In addition, to assess the impact of computer use more broadly on office practice today, a survey was conducted of over 100 Chapter Executive Members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in the United States of America.Survey results indicated that computer use has permeated all areas of landscape architecture practice, and that it has genuinely improved drawing quality and capability. However, it has not significantly impacted the artistic or creative aspects. Few respondents believed the computer can improve these facets of the profession or that traditional practice methods will be totally replaced by the computer.The results suggest that academic and professional sectors of landscape architecture must help educate existing professionals to fully grasp the benefits of current and emerging computer technologies and to prepare the future professionals for an increasingly digital practice

Adaptivity of 3D web content in web-based virtual museums : a quality of service and quality of experience perspective

The 3D Web emerged as an agglomeration of technologies that brought the third dimension to the World Wide Web. Its forms spanned from being systems with limited 3D capabilities to complete and complex Web-Based Virtual Worlds. The advent of the 3D Web provided great opportunities to museums by giving them an innovative medium to disseminate collections' information and associated interpretations in the form of digital artefacts, and virtual reconstructions thus leading to a new revolutionary way in cultural heritage curation, preservation and dissemination thereby reaching a wider audience. This audience consumes 3D Web material on a myriad of devices (mobile devices, tablets and personal computers) and network regimes (WiFi, 4G, 3G, etc.). Choreographing and presenting 3D Web components across all these heterogeneous platforms and network regimes present a significant challenge yet to overcome. The challenge is to achieve a good user Quality of Experience (QoE) across all these platforms. This means that different levels of fidelity of media may be appropriate. Therefore, servers hosting those media types need to adapt to the capabilities of a wide range of networks and devices. To achieve this, the research contributes the design and implementation of Hannibal, an adaptive QoS & QoE-aware engine that allows Web-Based Virtual Museums to deliver the best possible user experience across those platforms. In order to ensure effective adaptivity of 3D content, this research furthers the understanding of the 3D web in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) through empirical investigations studying how 3D Web components perform and what are their bottlenecks and in terms of QoE studying the subjective perception of fidelity of 3D Digital Heritage artefacts. Results of these experiments lead to the design and implementation of Hannibal

ImMApp: An immersive database of sound art

The ImMApp (Immersive Mapping Application) thesis addresses contemporary and historical sound art from a position informed by, on one hand, post-structural critical theory, and on the other, a practice-based exploration of contemporary digital technologies (MySQL, XML, XSLT, X3D). It proposes a critical ontological schema derived from Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and applies this to pre-existing information resources dealing with sound art. Firstly an analysis of print-based discourses (Sound by Artists. Lander and Lexier (1990), Noise, Water, Meat. Kahn (2001) and Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. LaBelle (2006» is carried out according to Foucauldian notions of genealogy, subject positions, the statement, institutional affordances and the productive nature of discursive formation. The discursive field (the archive) presented by these major canonical texts is then contrasted with a formulation derived from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: that of a 'minor' history of sound art practices. This is then extended by media theory (McLuhan, Kittler, Manovich) into a critique of two digital sound art resources (The Australian Sound Design Project (Bandt and Paine (2005) and soundtoys.net Stanza (1998). The divergences between the two forms of information technologies (print vs. digital) are discussed. The means by which such digitised methodologies may enhance Foucauldian discourse analysis points onwards towards the two practice-based elements of the thesis. Surface, the first iterative part, is a web-browser based database built on an Apache/MySQIlXML architecture. It is the most extensive mapping of sound art undertaken to date and extends the theoretical framework discussed above into the digital domain. Immersion, the second part, is a re-presentation of this material in an immersive digital environment, following the transformation of the source material via XSL-T into X3D. Immersion is a real-time, large format video, surround sound (5.ln.l) installation and the thesis concludes with a discussion of how this outcome has articulated Foucauldian archaeological method and unframed pre-existing notions of the nature of sound art

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

NASA Tech Briefs, May 1997

Topics covered include: Advanced Composites, Plastics and Metals; Electronic Components and Circuits; Electronic Systems; Physical Sciences; Materials; Computer Programs; Mechanics; Machinery/Automation; Manufacturing/Fabrication; Mathematics and Information Sciences; Life Sciences; Books and Reports

Augmented reality and scene examination

The research presented in this thesis explores the impact of Augmented Reality on human performance, and compares this technology with Virtual Reality using a head-mounted video-feed for a variety of tasks that relate to scene examination. The motivation for the work was the question of whether Augmented Reality could provide a vehicle for training in crime scene investigation. The Augmented Reality application was developed using fiducial markers in the Windows Presentation Foundation, running on a wearable computer platform; Virtual Reality was developed using the Crytek game engine to present a photo-realistic 3D environment; and a video-feed was provided through head-mounted webcam. All media were presented through head-mounted displays of similar resolution to provide the sole source of visual information to participants in the experiments. The experiments were designed to increase the amount of mobility required to conduct the search task, i.e., from rotation in the horizontal or vertical plane through to movement around a room. In each experiment, participants were required to find objects and subsequently recall their location. It is concluded that human performance is affected not merely via the medium through which the world is perceived but moreover, the constraints governing how movement in the world is controlled

Ontology-Driven Semantic Annotations for Multiple Engineering Viewpoints in Computer Aided Design

Engineering design involves a series of activities to handle data, including capturing and storing data, retrieval and manipulation of data. This also applies throughout the entire product lifecycle (PLC). Unfortunately, a closed loop of knowledge and information management system has not been implemented for the PLC. As part of product lifecycle management (PLM) approaches, computer-aided design (CAD) systems are extensively used from embodiment and detail design stages in mechanical engineering. However, current CAD systems lack the ability to handle semantically-rich information, thus to represent, manage and use knowledge among multidisciplinary engineers, and to integrate various tools/services with distributed data and knowledge. To address these challenges, a general-purpose semantic annotation approach based on CAD systems in the mechanical engineering domain is proposed, which contributes to knowledge management and reuse, data interoperability and tool integration. In present-day PLM systems, annotation approaches are currently embedded in software applications and use diverse data and anchor representations, making them static, inflexible and difficult to incorporate with external systems. This research will argue that it is possible to take a generalised approach to annotation with formal annotation content structures and anchoring mechanisms described using general-purpose ontologies. In this way viewpoint-oriented annotation may readily be captured, represented and incorporated into PLM systems together with existing annotations in a common framework, and the knowledge collected or generated from multiple engineering viewpoints may be reasoned with to derive additional knowledge to enable downstream processes. Therefore, knowledge can be propagated and evolved through the PLC. Within this framework, a knowledge modelling methodology has also been proposed for developing knowledge models in various situations. In addition, a prototype system has been designed and developed in order to evaluate the core contributions of this proposed concept. According to an evaluation plan, cost estimation and finite element analysis as case studies have been used to validate the usefulness, feasibility and generality of the proposed framework. Discussion has been carried out based on this evaluation. As a conclusion, the presented research work has met the original aim and objectives, and can be improved further. At the end, some research directions have been suggested.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo